New from Cambridge University Press!

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

Book Information

The act of questioning is the primary speech interaction between aninstitutional speaker and someone outside the institution. These rolesdictate their language practices. "Why Do You Ask?" is the first collectedvolume to focus solely on the question/answer process, drawing on a rangeof methodological approaches like Conversational Analysis, DiscourseAnalysis, Discursive Psychology, and Sociolinguistics-- and using as datanot just medical, legal, and educational environments, but alsoless-studied institutions like telephone call centers, broadcast journalism(i.e. talk show interviews), academia, and telemarketing.

An international roster of well-known contributors addresses such issuesas: the relationship between the syntax of the question and its discoursefunction; the kind of institutional work that questions perform; the degreeto which the questioner can control the direction of the conversation; andhow questions are used to repackage responses, to construct meaning, and toserve the institutional goals of speakers.

"Why Do You Ask?" will appeal to linguists and others interested ininstitutional discourse, as well as those interested in thegrammatical/pragmatic nature of questions.